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The other day, Reuters reported that Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden has developed a “middle-ground” plan for Climate Action. Well, Joe, the Climate does not compromise with corporate favorites: fracked natural gas, futuristic hopes for carbon capture technology, or nuclear power. When it comes to climate chaos, the middle ground is where total societal collapse will start.

Biden is an old-time Democrat who does not seem to understand the planetary transformation that confronts humanity today. His focus seems, as always, fixated on gaining the support of the most powerful institutions and elites in the nation while trying to charm the American voters with that toothy smile, as if the existential threat to humanity were just another campaign issue among many.

The whole point of the Green New Deal is that there is no “middle ground” when it comes to the global chaos now emerging. Profligate carbon emissions and ecosystem destabilization from the global industrial-consumer economy have already gone too far. Climate inaction has pushed us close to some critical tipping points leading to climate, ecosystem, and therefore societal collapse. Simply put, we cannot survive the collapse of the living Earth systems in which we live.

No Green New Joe

Of course, the forces of the status quo objected to the Green New Deal. To take on emerging climate chaos fully requires that we denizens of the global industrial-consumer economic bubble must change the way we live. The young members of the Sunrise Movement and the Extinction Rebellion movement know this. They do not feel constrained by the old political deal-making that kept all those representatives and senators so well healed over so many decades.

Biden is an old-fashioned “business as usual” politician. His early lead in the run-up to the Democratic primary rests primarily on name recognition and on the disproportionate attention the corporate media give him. However, Biden does carry a lot of negative political baggage. Trying to unload some at the political last minute will not work. Ask Anita Hill. His glib generalities belie a stubborn refusal to acknowledge past patriarchal practices.

Wrong Side of History

All that suggests to me that he is still the same guy – an old corporate Dem who is more concerned with cementing relations with the same old corporate and financial elites that have controlled national politics for far too long. He was on the wrong side of civil rights, mass incarceration, and the Iraq war. What more might we want to avoid? Well, his key supporters (lobbyists and big donors) have apparently formed a $60 million “dark money” group; we know that kind of fundraising does not focus on small individual donations or the interests of the American people.

If Biden’s brand of business-as-usual politics prevails and the “Ecomodernsts” control climate action, the likelihood of societal collapse and human depopulation, amidst an increasingly unrecognizable and unlivable changing planet will rapidly approach certainty. Some argue it already has.

The Green New Deal (GND) may or may not have much chance as a framework for drafting realistic climate legislation. Not only does a slavishly Trumpist Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, defy Senate tradition and democratic principles to fight any proposal the president does not like. He and his Republican cohorts block anything the Democrats propose, just as they embodied the Congress of No in racist opposition to anything President Obama proposed, even ideas formerly floated by Republicans.

Deep Denial

But an even deeper problem underlies the probable fate of the Green New Deal, even if, perchance, the 2020 elections were to install a Jay Inslee as President and capture the Senate for the Democrats. On the one hand, over 600 organizations, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and 350.org have signed a letter supporting the framework of the Green New Deal. However, in what may ultimately constitute a greater barrier to rational and necessarily extreme societal action to stave off the most severe consequences of climate chaos, including societal collapse, some of the largest environmental groups have refused to sign the letter supporting the Green New Deal.

Among the refusers, according to The New Republic magazine, were “the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, Mom’s Clean Air Force, Environment America, and the Audubon Society. Two green groups founded by deep-pocketed Democratic celebrities are also absent: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and Tom Steyer’s NextGen America.”

Techno-Industrial Culture

Why the resistance from the biggest environmental organizations? In part, these groups object to the exclusion of still unproven carbon-capture technologies from the GND plan. GND exclusion of “market mechanisms” that where tried profited polluting corporations able to manipulate carbon trading but failed to make a dent in carbon emissions, was also a factor. The Sierra Club expressed the need for a more “inclusive process.” Resistance by the non-signers seems to center around what the Green New Deal excludes, such as nuclear power, geoengineering, and market-based mechanisms for trying to limit or sequester carbon emissions.

Here’s the thing. For a long time now, the biggest environmental organizations have depended on the biggest corporations for much of their revenue. These organizations saw financial success by extracting small concessions for big donations. In effect, they were paid off to demand only changes that the corporations considered minor “costs of doing business.” Now they want technologies favoring big corporate interests, included in the GND. The biggest environmental organizations remain captives of the techno-industrial culture.

Most institutions in the U.S. remain captured by the culture of neoliberal economic theory, that is, the ideology of the mainstream economy, which asserts that all good things come from free corporate markets. The climate-denialist and techno-industrial ideologies have infiltrated even philanthropy, to the extent of biasing research funding toward a milder take on the dangers of climate change than demonstrated by hard scientific data.

Resistance to the GND results in part from the fact that the public discourse remains under the control of an ideology that frames the “climate problem” as “fixable” by conventional technologies and market mechanisms that the corporate and financial elites control. That is the stance of the so-called “environmental modernists,” who cling to the dying ideology of technological innovation and free corporate markets as the essence of human progress.

Societal Collapse

There is nothing comfortable about the most precise scientific predictions of climate chaos leading to societal collapse. Nevertheless, with a high degree of certainty, the data show that the self-amplifying processes of system breakdown built into existing and forecasted planetary effects of global warming brought on by the overconsumption inherent in the industrial era. These processes will force the collapse of financial, political, economic, and ecological systems, and finally of society itself, all of which humans depend on for survival and comfort. If we try to hold onto our unsustainable comfort, we will lose the battle for survival.

Collapse is simply outside of the lexicon of big environmental organizations, no less most of the members of Congress or the American population. Nevertheless, the facts of destabilizing changes in climate, global finance, and politics, all foretell an extremely uncomfortable near future approaching human extinction, unless we undertake radical uncompromising climate action now.

Artificial wealth comprises the things which of themselves satisfy no natural need, for example money, which is a human contrivance.

~ St. Thomas Aquinas

Buzzwords seem to rule public discussion of just about everything. Money is no exception. Now it’s “Modern Monetary Theory.” What’s that? Well, it depends on who you ask. In modern times, debates usually center on public debt and the government’s fiscal and monetary policies.

An article in Boomberg News argued that the supporters of The Green New Deal favor Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Critics argue that the costs of universal health care, publicly funded higher education, infrastructure buildout, and conversion to 100% renewable energy production would require unsustainable public debt. MMT supposedly sets no limits on public debt. That is apparently not quite true, but within the U.S. monetary system and corporate political squeeze on public spending, the costs of the Green New Deal, if financed by public debt, would be quite high.

Of course, if we calculate the infrastructure damage of climate chaos even if we met the limits of the Paris Accords – never mind the costs in terms of human lives – the comparative costs of implementing the Green New Deal would be trivial. In that sense, costs are relative. The underlying question is: What does society want to achieve and is it willing to pay for achieving it?

The Debt Illusion

Money is a social construction. It exists by social convention, by consensual definition. Throughout history, money has taken diverse forms, as long as the forms taken could provide the security needed for money to be money. That is why gold worked so well as currency until the global economy grew so large that the supply of gold could not keep up with the need for more currency.

Scholars have written some very large books on the nature of money and debt. How money evolved is quite fascinating. David Graeber’s book, Debt: the First 5000 Years, is quite enlightening, particularly regarding the diverse forms money has taken in history.

Public debt is not necessary; instead, it is a convention devised by bankers to control the economy of nation states. In that, the banks have succeeded.

If a sovereign nation controlled its central bank, it would not need to borrow the currency it issues since it is the sole source of authority to create money. The creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve as a banking cartelin 1913 made that impossible.

The expanding Roman Empire paid its soldiers using gold and silver coins it minted from metals mined mostly in Spain and Portugal. It did not borrow its money from anyone. Among the many causes of the fall of the Empire, was the fact that when the mines played out, the Empire could no longer satisfy its need for more coins to pay an expanding army. The operations of the Empire were stifled because it could not pay its soldiers.

Money need not be based on public debt, but in the industrial economies of the modern era, it is. That political choice enriches the banks and the corporations they fund, and it impoverishes nations. Neither supporters nor critics of Modern Monetary Theory seem to get this.

Implementing a national project or sustaining an institution is not a matter of how much debt we can tolerate. Rather, it is a matter of political will. The lavish support for the military that sustains the global modern industrial-consumer economy demonstrates that.

Fearful Fantasies and Fiat Money

To work effectively, money has to be made of a material and in a form that has some unique irreplaceable quality that makes it impossible to replicate by just anybody. That is why rare metals worked so well until economies grew so large in the modern era that the money supply could not expand enough using gold and silver.

When paper money replaced gold, the idea of “fiat money” implied that paper money was not really “real money” like gold. Nevertheless, it worked because it is hard to counterfeit, making it unreproducible by anyone other than the sovereign (for the most part).

Unnecessary debt combined with the failure to tax corporate profits creates annual deficits, which add to the national debt. The central bank creates fiat money through the sleight of hand of issuing government debt in the form of bonds as the basis of “loaning” money created out of nothing, to the government. If the sovereign issued money without the mechanism of “borrowing” from the central bank (in the U.S., the Federal Reserve) it would not create debt by issuing money.

If a sovereign issued money solely on the basis of needing to fund worthy projects, to hire the workers and buy the materials to complete the projects, the money would, as a result, circulate among the population of the nation, providing the ‘buying power’ needed to generate the goods and services people need.

National debt is unnecessary. In stark contrast, something very much like the Green New Deal is as necessary as anything can be. It is a matter of survival.

As Republicans try to drive a wedge between “centrist” and progressive Democrats, the Democrats might not need any help to achieve failure. They are well on the way to falling flat in front of the unique challenges they face in a bizarre couple of years running up to the 2020 presidential election.

Party Palliatives

DNC operatives and their favorites, the candidates who spout conventionally “liberal” slogans yet act like Reagan Republicans still control the Democratic Party. They take large corporate donations and “dark money” that tie them to the neoliberal economic thrust that takes us closer to full-blown climate chaos each day. Well, actually, the crisis is here and it is now.

In the run-up to the 2016 debacle, I remember seeing a survey posted online by Senator Keith Ellison asking Democrats to respond with their three top priorities for the Democratic Party Platform. The list provided did not include any mention of climate action, the overwhelmingly denied and ignored yet most critical issue of our time. Here is the list:

Raising the minimum wage

Civil rights

Making college more affordable

Protecting women’s health care choices

Immigration reform

Protecting and expanding Social Security

Overturning Citizens United

Reducing economic inequality

Wall Street accountability and consumer protection

Common-sense gun reform

Affordable housing

Criminal justice reform

Other

Okay, these are all issues that call for political action to achieve a livable society – in the abstract. Each is general enough that a politician could proclaim allegiance to taking action on it without actually having to do anything. The climate silence was deafening. The current listing of issues in the 2016 Party Platform on the party website does mention “Combat Climate Change,” briefly in the middle of the list. Once Bernie from contention, the greatest existential threat to humanity ever, Hillary mostly ignored it through the campaign. However, fear of a Trumpist future caused the 2018 midterm elections to blow a fresh new breeze into the U.S. House of Representatives.

Here Come the New Progressives

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) rapidly emerged as the face of the new progressive Democrats elected to the House in the midterms. Her unexpected trouncing of an old-line centrist incumbent in the primary quickly became the icon of new progressive thinking among the new representatives, who are mostly women of color.

A good measure of their impact and importance for possibly bringing the Democratic Party into the twenty-first century is the outrage and disdain expressed by Republicans at AOC’s very presence. Her highly articulate and charming outspoken expression of progressive values and her specific legislative proposals took the media’s attention away from the old party hacks.

The new progressives have already proposed a Green New Deal and helped shape HR-1, the bill that would take back control of politics from Big Money and give it to the people through electoral reform and other measures to protect democracy from the corporate state. Mitch McConnell predictably called it a “power grab,” yes, they replied, a power grab for the people.

The Struggle is On

The Corporate Democrats are not about to give up. They have already joined Republicans in attacking Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) for her calling out knee-jerk American political support for Israeli oppression and war crimes against the Palestinians. Omar had tried to distinguish between anti-semitism – of which anyone who criticizes Israel’s policies is accused – and reasoned and principled foreign policy by the U.S. But the women of color who expressed their solidarity at the State of the Union address by wearing white in honor of the original suffragettes, are strong and they are not about sit down and shut up as subservient freshmen representatives.

The American people are wising up. They see the catastrophic climate changes already accelerating around the world. They can no longer imagine the U.S. as a sanctuary for the industrial-consumer “lifestyle” in a world of growing chaos. The Democrats would do very well to acknowledge the extreme existential threat we face and make it the centerpiece of their platform. But the new progressives must take control of the party if it is to represent the interests of the American people.

A policy of adaptation to climate change as the primary response to climate change would not only be self-defeating. It would tax all human and material capital on the planet in pursuit of an impossible dream. It is fundamentally failure-bound because climate chaos would easily overwhelm it. That is why the Green New Deal is such an important cultural turning point for the American people.

That is also why the failure of politicians to adapt to the new conditions recognized by a citizenry that is awakening to the extremity of the emerging climate reality is so offensive. The politicians are not prepared to face actual constituents who know what is going on and expect them to do something about it. Frankly, they serve the short-term financial interests of the big fossil-fueled corporations that continue to disrupt the Earth System at its very core as if there were no tomorrow. There will be no captain once the ship sinks.

Well, as time goes by, tomorrow becomes today, but the time for major climate action was yesterday. To anyone not bought off or just ignorantly out of the loop, only the most extreme climate action now has a chance to limit climate chaos from spiraling entirely out of control. The Green New Deal is a conceptual starting place. Even it is not enough if implemented, because so much more is involved in transforming a society from fossil-fuel addiction to ecosystem restoration. Yes, recycling more and buying a Prius while going about your industrial-consumerist “lifestyle” just won’t cut it.

Feinstein’s Folly

And that is why the old guard in Congress is so upset with smart political upstarts such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the youth of the Sunrise Movement. They refuse to mince words about the dangers ahead or accept platitudes in place of action. Politicians either dodge them completely by leaving their office by the back door or dismiss them out of hand. They patronize intelligent committed youth, most of whom know far more about the science of climate chaos than Senator Diane Feinstein, for example. She was so offensive when the Sunrise kids went to her seeking climate leadership instead of the same old BS. Well, they got the same old BS.

“I’ve been doing this for thirty years…[blah, blah, blah]…” Yes, and that is exactly the problem. For thirty years, the establishment politicians have kicked the can down the treacherous road to climate catastrophe. And now that we are at the brink, they want the rest of us to sit down and shut up because, in Feinstein’s words, “I know what I’m doing.” No, WE know what you are doing and it is too close to zero and too late to tolerate.

The Urgency of Now

Unless humans initiate major interventions now, toward reversing the trajectory of global warming, no amount of adaptation to the catastrophic consequences of global warming will be enough. Although it is hard to determine precisely, the tipping point toward full climate chaos is very close at hand. So many self-amplifying processes produce accelerating ecological destruction and may lead to human extinction unless humans act now to radically restrict our carbon emissions.

As Earth’s climate spirals toward a Jupiter-like atmosphere, intolerable conditions will extinguish most life on planet Earth. No human adaptation would be adequate unless it is a response to the conditions that we have already made less severe by taking extreme climate actions to mitigate the carbon emissions we continue to cause. And they are shocked because they think that the Green New Deal is a radical proposal that we somehow cannot afford. It is not nearly enough, but it points in the only direction we can afford. We must get reasonable politicians who can follow facts to begin leading a mobilization that made the transformation of American society to fight World War II seem like a spring picnic.

The misogynist racist good ol’ boys (well, rich old white men) are out in force now. Their hateful ridicule targets any outspoken woman who happened to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.

Alexandria Octavio-Cortez, dubbed AOC, the celebrity underdog who handily beat the old white male incumbent Establishment Democrat, is the iconic target of their spite. How dare she challenge their comfortable corporate feed trough? How dare she expect their super-rich handlers to pay their fair share of income taxes?

Tax the Rich?

The “extreme” marginal rate of 70% on the highest segment of the excessive earnings of the wealthiest Americans would be lower than that charged in the 1950s, when the Americans people (not just the rich) prospered more than any time before or since. GOP-driven (Democrat accepted) tax reductions for the wealthy have stifled economic growth and driven up public debt during every presidency from Reagan to Trump.

The progressive income tax scheme @AOC proposed is a bit lower than Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond calculated would be optimal – not too much, not too little – for the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to a healthy economy. She offends on several counts: her gender, her brown skin, her policy recommendations that challenge both patriarchy and plutocracy, and the shock of her demands for social, economic, and climate justice. On top of it all, like her colleagues, she just won’t “sit down and shut up.”

Patronize the Pantsuits?

And they expect her not to demand that children be healthy and well educated too, and that the Trumpist outlaw ICE-MEN return the children they kidnapped from their asylum-seeking parents. What next?

Oh, yes, these brash new representatives want a Green New Deal too. Why those anti-oligarchy democratic “socialists”! (Oh, is that still a dirty word?) They don’t even want to protect the plundering plutocrats from the ravages of facing up to climate chaos?

Oh, maybe they just don’t like white pantsuits, or women’s suffrage for that matter. That would go 10x for any woman wearing a headscarf, unless of course it was a gingham print and meant only as an accent for that beehive doo that might MAGA! (Remember the beehive? We’re talking 1950s here. They were as big as the tailfins on a 1959 Chevy.)

What these ol’ codgers really hate is an uppity woman who has brown skin, is even smarter than she is pretty, can easily outsmart them, and just “don’t know her place”. “Whoa there, young filly! Back in the kitchen with them barefoot brats!” That avalanche of smart progressive women of color entering the chambers of the political good ol’ boys club is just more than their privilege-addled brains can process.

Fascists in Victim’s Clothing

I never could quite understand why so many people confound the Jewish people with the state of Israel. Many people I’ve met around the world love Americans and America, but not its imperious government. I know of no nation-state in this world that is so pure and good that we should all declare it off limits to political, humanitarian, or policy criticism of any kind.

It was the Jewish people who suffered Nazi terror, not the state of Israel. I feel equally outraged by the ruthless violence of Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Netanyahu, and others too. But, any time someone criticizes the genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people, they are accused of supporting Hamas and terrorism. Nation states are the problem, not their people.

Go Figure. Well, you don’t have to figure much. U.S. politicians are terrified that someone might accuse them of being anti-Semitic. Closet racists often proclaim, “I am not a racist.” Same with closet anti-semites. Closet fascists claim to “bring democracy to the world” with state of the art military hardware. Too many Americans remain blind to nativist racism, even now when Trumpery has green-lighted its open expression.

I would suggest an analogy here. So many victims of abuse by parents, stepparents, or others with power grow up and become abusers themselves. Plenty of Israelis find it ironic and tragic that their government treats Palestinians nearly as badly as the Nazis treated their great-grandparents. Too many Americans are blind to the racism they tolerate because it does not directly interfere with their personal lives. Some are just clueless.

Too many easily fall into the hatred-on-the-rise that the new American fascists foment. The surge in violent hate crimes in the U.S., including anti-Semitic hate crimes, is no accident. It is part of the pattern of moral decay and political nihilism enabled by the political demagogues. That will only lead to more authoritarian politics and enable dictatorship to crush democracy unless the rest of us resist the hate.

Many consider David Brooks the voice of conservative reason In America. After all, he has even published some almost sociological books on matters of character, family, and progress toward ‘the American dream.’ And, he presents himself as a soft-spoken empathic analyst on the Sunday talk shows and in his New York Times column.

Brooks may even entertain a valid point about the craziness of Trump or some of his extreme white nationalist supporters being a bit off target. He always seems to be concerned about protecting basic American values. That is why his entry into the surge of right-wing sniping at the persons and policies behind the congressional Green New Deal (GND) resolution might seem plausible to some. After all, most folks have not read its 14 pages.

Democracy of the GND

Offered up in the House of Representatives, the Green New Deal stands out as a unique document in the history of the Congress. It is a call to the U.S. government and the American people to mobilize on a scale analogous to the mobilization of American society to fight World War II. It is the first statement I have seen from any branch of the federal government that directly confronts the urgency of the crisis of impending climate collapse.

Brooks’ objections come off as almost objective comments on the failures of a few naïve idealists. He fears they would attempt to solve the nation’s and the world’s problems by dictates from newly centralized government authorities. If we are to believe Brooks, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ed Markey, and the dozens of other congressional sponsors must be a bunch of old Stalinists. He claims that “the left” has “embraced elitism” by using the GND to centralize power.

Reactionary Elitism in Freedom’s Clothing

That is not only a complete misrepresentation, but it entirely misses, or should I say dodges, the main point of the Green New Deal. The climate crisis is real and it is now. Only by abandoning the elitism of the corporate Democrats and the plutocratic Republicans can we achieve social and economic justice. Congress can achieve that by initiating a Green New Deal that mitigates many of the disastrous consequences of the neoliberal corporate global economy they have fostered.

They may mouth platitudes of social concern like David Brooks does, but the corporatist right in both parties has always objected to the government doing anything to solve the nation’s problems, claiming “the private sector” can do a much better job. (Just take a look at privatized prisons, education, and the tortuous internment of the children of asylum seekers for an answer to that question.)

When it comes to assessing the potential impact of the Green New Deal, David goes right off the rails. He falls flat into the swamp of corporatist objections to any government involvement in efforts at achieving social progress. After all, that might impinge on his faith in the trajectory of the corporate state and its extreme fantasies of staying the course of business as usual.

Far more importantly, however, Brooks’ character assassination of the GND and its supporters implicitly denies not only the validity but the overriding urgency of the climate crisis we all face, like it or not. Instead, he reverts to the classic redbaiting of the past in his vain attempts to silence the voices of concern with people and planet.

Hopeful Realism vs. Political Climate Denial

How can Brooks characterize a call for community proposals for reducing carbon emissions based on the science and funded by the federal government, as a play for centralized power? Oh, there you have it. Government funding means taxing the rich and the giant corporations since the concentration of wealth leaves everyone else with marginal incomes. The top 100 corporations cause the majority of carbon emissions. And AOC would dare to institute a 70% marginal income tax rate, almost as high as we had in the 1950s, the most prosperous era for everyone in the USA.

For Brooks, the climate crisis is not even an issue. He denies it by omission. Instead, he focuses on political semantics. He dodges the question of whether the GND is “socialist” or not, embarrassed by his fear of the comfortable acceptance of the democratic socialist ideas embedded in the original New Deal. He shapes his inferences about the GND’s broad provisions to fit the terrifying characteristics of a dictatorial socialist state. Never mind that the sponsors of the resolution are all staunch decentralists, social democrats, and plain old fashioned liberals, who are just as concerned with overbearing bureaucracy as David ever was.

David Brooks would rather vilify the new hopeful realists in Congress than face the fact that the corporate state he equates with individual freedom is unsustainable. A New Great Transformation has begun and we need to take charge of our fate within the conditions that our profligate waste has created. The Green New Deal is merely a tiny step forward, or more accurately, a recognition of necessity. Wake up, David.